Let’s Clarify a Few Things About the New ‘Adversity Score.’ (First, Stop Calling It That.)

Alarm. Anger. Confusion. News of the College Board’s Environmental Context Dashboard has caused all of the above.

As The Chronicle reported last week, more than 50 colleges have been using a new online tool designed to give admissions offices a better understanding of applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds — and the challenges they may have encountered. On Thursday the College Board hosted a webinar to clear up some misunderstandings. Here are five key takeaways.

“Adversity score” is a problematic term. Yes, some admissions officials have used that shorthand phrase to convey what the dashboard does, which is to calculate an applicant’s “Overall Disadvantage Level,” on a scale of one to 100. The higher the number, the more disadvantaged the applicant. But that number is not really a “score” like an SAT score. That 1-to-100 number doesn’t affect an applicant’s SAT score or appear on score reports sent to colleges. So … expect some other term to emerge.

The tool doesn’t get personal. The dashboard lists each applicant’s SAT score (or concordant SAT score for an ACT taker), and shows how it compares with those of other students in his or her high school. Beyond that, the dashboard does not take into account a student’s personal characteristics. Nor is it meant to reduce an application’s qualitative aspects to a number. “The dashboard does not replace any individual information that a student provides in their application,” Joe Williams, senior director for higher education at the College Board, said on Thursday.

Everything else is environmental data. The dashboard uses publicly available federal statistics and aggregated College Board data to display two distinct measures of disadvantage: neighborhood-level and school-level. The former, drawn from census-tract data, is “more granular than a ZIP code,” Williams said. That can prove useful to admissions offices, which might lack a good lens for understanding the type of neighborhood an applicant comes from. (That neighborhood might look quite different from the one in which his or her high school is located.) High-school-level measures of disadvantage are based on weighted census-tract data for all students at the school.

This information isn’t necessarily redundant. Sure, most admissions offices already have a ton of information about applicants’ high schools. But keeping those high-school profiles up-to-date as more and more applications pour in from more and more places well beyond one’s campus? “That’s a real challenge,” John Barnhill, associate vice president for enrollment management at Florida State University, said on Thursday. The College Board refreshes the dashboard as more data become available. Though Barnhill said he was skeptical of the tool early on, its contextual information has helped the university identify and enroll disadvantaged applicants who warranted a closer look. And he suggested that the tool would help the university provide better support for students once they enroll.

For better or worse, the dashboard isn’t a revolutionary tool. More than four-fifths of colleges now piloting the dashboard report that it has often helped them evaluate students who are greatly disadvantaged, according the the College Board. Typically, it’s used to assess “small groups of applicants on the margins,” Williams said. In other words, it’s not ushering in a brave, new world of admissions as much as it’s helping some admissions offices refine or confirm their evaluations of some applicants. The College Board plans to expand the pilot to include more than 150 colleges this fall before making it widely available as a free service.

Eric Hoover writes about the challenges of getting to, and through, college. Follow him on Twitter @erichoov, or email him, at eric.hoover@chronicle.com.